About two or three days later, Kevin was parked in the Publix parking lot in Daytona Beach Shores, reading the paper, and came across an article about Charlie’s final crimes that he had just committed in Orlando.
Kevin immediately called Jim and shouted over the telephone: “Jim, you need to go read the paper right now!” Jim replied, confusedly, “Why? What?” Kevin repeated: “You just need to go read the paper right now! Look at Section Three!”
When asked about the possibility that, given his age—Kevin was eighteen and Charlie was twenty back when they hung out together—and the time frame, Charlie could have been killing then, Kevin’s immediate response was, “Sure!” The friend was prepared to back that up with the narration of an interesting, yet somewhat terrifying story.
“Charlie used to come home from working at Bahama Joe’s, the seafood joint, in the kitchen,” the then-roommate began. “And when he came home at night, he smelled absolutely awful. He was wearing his work outfit, but also those big awkward rubber boots you wear to either flyfish or trudge through deep water. And all over his boots and his clothes would be blood.” Kevin stated that Charlie claimed it was the kitchen that smelled so awful, and that the blood all over him was because the “meat was really fresh.”
Folks who are kitchen workers, especially in seafood places, do not come home covered in blood, nor could the few who were interviewed for this passage explain why someone would, let alone have to, wear rubber boots on the job.
For all of this, there might have been plausible explanations. But had Charlie been alive, there would have been plenty of circumstantial evidence in his case, aside from all the direct evidence of the bodies. Investigators have found significant evidence that Charlie was a student of his “craft.”
Special Agent D’Ambrosia points to an anatomy chart investigators found in Charlie’s house on Big Pine Key. She explains the most relevent connection with this disturbing poster, which was of the body of a woman with her hair in a bun on top of her head, one half depicting muscle tissue and the other the skeleton and bones:
“He had a sexual obsession with body parts, organs, necrophilia, peeping, women’s lingerie, etc. He enjoyed viewing a variety of sexually deviant Internet sites and received Victoria’s Secret catalogues.” Investigators found a lot of necrophiliac sites on his computer, and the Victoria’s Secret catalogues, all mailed to Charlie, were stashed in his attic. The necrophiliac sites are very graphic.
An analysis of Charlie’s computer, seized from his home in Big Pine Key, revealed that he regularly visited several Internet sites with topics like “erotic horror” and “death-fetish erotica” and “drop-dead gorgeous.” When forensic computer analysts reviewed Charlie’s computer, they found he frequented sites depicting nude women in violent and bloody scenes, or who were made to look dead or injured.
“All these things fueled his fantasies and his particular desires,” profiler D’Ambrosia said. “I took the female anatomy chart to be just another item that he viewed to fuel his fantasy of dismemberment, et cetera. One must ask, why would he need a full chart affixed to the back of the bedroom door? If there was an interest or curiosity in anatomy by a person, do they actually post it on the back of their bedroom door? I would say no. It might be accessible in the office—and they had an office set up in the second bedroom—but not the bedroom.”
In “People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil,” M. Scott Peck, M.D. references Erich Fromm’s broadened definition of necrophilia “to include the desire of certain people to control others—to make them controllable, to foster their dependency….” and further defines the “necrophilic character type” as someone “whose aim is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.” That was what Jeffrey Dahmer did, taking it to the extreme. But nobody knows if Charlie engaged in cannibalism.
Dr. Michael Brannon has an opinion on the subject:
“We really believe, with such an odd and unusual behavior, that there is some biological disorder. In some places where cannibalism is accepted, that would be the norm. But in our society, where it is such a taboo, something must have happened in terms of a biological disorder. So yes, he may well have engaged in cannibalism. Body parts can become trophies. If no such trophies are found, they become cannibalized.” Some of the body parts of the women that Charlie disemboweled were never found.
Marty Morgenrath, another one of Teri and Mary Lou’s sisters, may hold some sort of explanation.
“My husband and I visited them, Charlie and Teri, in 2000.” Marty is a post-traumatic therapist. “I gave a massage to my sister and offered to give one to Charlie, and he refused. But when we all went to the beach I noticed he had a large scar in his chest down to his abdomen. I think he’d had some physical trauma as a very young infant.”
“Charlie was very quiet, very controlled, in his emotional responses, and we thought, something had happened to him when he was younger. It was some kind of abdominal surgery when he was an infant,” Marty added. “I have spoken to other experts in trauma therapy,” stated Teri’s sister. “That kind of early surgical trauma could have some psychological repercussions.”
Charlie kept the anatomy chart behind his bedroom door, the bedroom he shared with his wife. Did he need that stimulus to make love? Perhaps his desire was to have her be submissive. In the end, he finally got his wish with her, and with Michelle, with whom he was obsessed. Jeffrey Dahmer kept his victims’ parts, fueled by the same desire, and also from a fear of abandonment. Dahmer had been left alone in his family home by his parents for one whole year. And both Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway engaged in post-mortem sex with corpses as a means of control.
As to what Charlie did with the body parts that were not found, Special Agent D’Ambrosia is hesitant to speculate, and does it with a disclaimer:
“It is against everything I do to guess randomly without basis, which is what I would be doing if I guessed what he did with body parts. The best I can say is that given his fantasy-based behaviors/obsessions, it is possible that he would utilize souvenirs to relive his crimes for the purpose of sexual gratification. What would support this is the fact that there were body parts missing (e.g. taken to fantasize). If his intent was mere dissection/disarticulation, then he would not have taken the hearts (and in one case the head) of his victims. What would be the point? There are documented cases where other offenders who took body parts either consumed them or, in the cases with missing heads, buried them to unearth them later for the purpose of masturbation while fantasizing. There are cases where the offender stored parts in freezers in foil and/or plastic wrap. I also had another case involving the removal of a body part that was later used in a stew made by the offender, which he generously cooked for a group of people.
“With Charlie, it would be a guess to say if he buried the body parts if he consumed them, and I won’t weigh in on that. All I can say is he did remove body parts, he was highly fantasy-oriented, so at a minimum you can deduce they were instruments of fantasy for sexual gratification. Logically there is no need to take something if you will not ‘use’ it sometime in the future. What can’t be ignored is that with his last victim, he did not consume any organs or body parts, when he certainly had the opportunity to do so. Now, because he committed suicide and likely was planning the suicide in advance, he would have had no need to bury/store/preserve body parts if the intent was to later unearth them to relive his actions… he knew he wasn’t going to be present in the future to do this.”
And sure enough, Michelle’s body parts were all left inside her room.
Jim Graves had one experience he found peculiar, when Charlie and Teri had recently married and Jim was single and playing music gigs in the Keys.
Jim was staying at Charlie and Teri’s house.
“I was at the house and they had both gone to work. I was still young and a night owl, and hanging around in bars. During the day I was looking for something t
o read, and underneath the coffee table there was one of those very basic ‘how to have good sex’ books. Now, I can’t help but wonder if he was deficient in that department. I was twenty-eight at the time and Charlie was twenty-seven, and I remember thinking to myself, he should know how to do it by now. I remember reading those books when I was seventeen!”
But again, before Teri, there was Carol Lynn Sullivan and Andros Island, and many other instances when, from the accounts of Teri’s friends, Charlie would have been considered just a lecher with fantasies about extra-marital activities. These activities may be considered despicable, but do not account for a serial killer who disemboweled his victims. And they certainly do not account for someone who does not know anything about sex.
After all, on September 20, 1978, Carol Lynn Sullivan disappeared from a rural bus stop in Osteen, and two weeks later, her head was found stuffed in a rusty paint can in a remote spot near Deltona.
By then, Charlie had graduated from Seabreeze High School and had earned an Associate of Science degree from Daytona Beach Community College. He was working in nearby Flagler County. Her body was never recovered.
Special Agent D’Ambrosia offered her knowledge of a serial killer’s “cooling-off period” as she viewed it in relation to Charlie.
“You cannot predict an individual’s cooling-off period, because there is no set timeframe for such an event,” explained the experienced profiler. “The term ‘cooling-off period’ was originally coined to describe/differentiate between the different types of killers: mass, spree, serial, et cetera. The definition for serial murder included an emotional cooling off period between events, whereas the spree murder had no emotional cooling-off; it was a continuous event, even if it occurred over an extended period of time. We do often look at what was going on during a cooling-off period especially if you have a sexually fantasy-motivated crime. Those urges/desires just don’t stop. But also, they don’t necessarily constantly exist on a fixed schedule. So they occur when they occur. What we have seen is that a cooling-off period can occur or be extended when an offender is engaged in behaviors that tend to satisfy the urges. Having said that, not every single serial killer with a cooling-off period has to satiate his urges to keep from committing the next crime. The next crime may have occurred because of a precipitating stressor prior to the crime. So, back to Charlie: he was satisfying urges/fantasies by engaging in other behaviors that may have satisfied his fantasy needs, such as the Internet searches that provided information/interaction regarding necrophilia.”
D’Ambrosia, however, had not been apprised either of Carol Lynn Sullivan’s murder, nor of Charlie’s stint in Andros Island.
Carol Lynn Sullivan may have been Charlie’s first killing, Jim now shudders to think.
“I thought he had done it from that time at the dinner table,” he recalled. Charlie’s reaction when both young men were having dinner at Jim’s mother’s house and Mrs. Graves mentioned that a young girl’s head was found inside a paint can.
“I have a perfect picture in my mind of what he looked like when he started laughing. He looked evil! It gave me chills. I thought, what’s funny about this? I had a gut feeling he did it. He literally had a mouthful of food and spit it out, laughing.”
Up until then, Charlie had been under the watchful eyes of his sister, his father, and his friend Jim. Then, he was staying at Jim’s mother’s house while he attended Daytona Beach Community College; his father had moved away, and Jim was also away at school. “There was nobody around him who knew,” Jim pointed out.
But Jim, who had gone to high school with Charlie, and was married to his sister Angela, holds a theory in opposition to the cooling-off period hypothesis.
“One unexplored avenue was Andros Island,” he stated. “And if that happened, those poor mothers deserve to know what happened to their daughters.” Jim doesn’t believe they will, though. He does believe “Charlie was killing over there. He was there when he was twenty-two and he was there for seven years. When I was talking to the FDLE they told me they were looking for every place he had been, and looked for MOs. I said, ‘What about the Bahamas?’ I thought that might have something to do with why he was drinking so much then. It was funny, because they were running a drug interdiction operation and getting high on coke. All he had to do was go to town, get drunk, and get a black girl,” Jim stated in a disparaging tone about crimes he believes have not been solved.
“And Charlie was a racist!” He would have been working in the Bahamas after Carol Lynn Sullivan’s head was found,” he added, implying Charlie would have thought nothing at all about taking and raping a black woman.
The scuttlebutt—mostly in Fort Wayne spread by the media whenever the murder of his mother was mentioned—was that Charlie’s first trigger had been the accidental shooting of his pet dog over the Christmas vacation by his father. It was not true. Charlie himself said he was going to cry, but did not, and spent the next two hours hunting with his dad. And Herbert stated that after he had shot at the woods to get the dog out and accidentally shot him, Charlie hadn’t reacted at all, and this really concerned him.
When the police questioned Charlie about his motivation for the murder of his mother and shooting of his father, he answered that he did not really know why he had done it.
“A combination of things,” he said. “A lot of work, tests to make up. I had to make up my interim card. Everything sort of snapped in my mind. I felt like I never felt before.”
Charlie was born in Connecticut in 1956. It was where the family relocated after immigrating to Texas. It was where Charlie grew up, went to school, and made friends.
Herbert Brandt was transferred to Fort Wayne, to the Harvester plant in 1968.
Charlie felt he did not fit in, and did not make friends. He did not like it in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
And he said he did not remember how many shots he’d fired at his parents that night of January 3, 1971.
“After the first shot, I can’t remember how many shots. I think the gun was empty.”
It was his older sister, Angela, the hippie fifteen-year-old who had Beatles posters on her bedroom walls, who had persuaded him to stop, after her brother tried to shoot her and began strangling her.
“We’ll run away to a hippie commune,” Angie said to appease him and to erase the glazed, manic look in his eyes, a look that had really frightened her. “I won’t leave you, I promise.” Again, Angela, had known her little brother was trying to ease his sense of abandonment. Why?
Police officers had driven Charlie to the Allen County Jail. After a few days, one officer took him to the hospital to see his ailing father. Charlie asked for permission to cry. Was it on account of Herbert’s strict upbringing, or Charlie’s inner programming, that he felt to present an appropriate façade to the world?
At the hospital, Charlie apologized to his father. Herbert told him that everything would be all right, and the family never spoke about the incident again—except the time when Charlie told Angela he was going to get married to Teri Helfrich. Then Angela, who was thirty at the time, insisted her brother tell Teri the truth about his past.
“Yes, tell Teri everything,” she said. “If you do, and she doesn’t marry you, then you’ll just have to live with that. If you don’t, somehow, sometime, she might find out, and that’s not going to go over well.”
Charlie acquiesced and told her sister he would take her advice.
Charlie and Teri were married August 29, 1986. No family members on either side were invited.
And nobody could tell with any degree of certainty whether Teri Helfrich, now Brandt, knew the truth about her husband’s past. “She would not have married him if she had known,” her sister and Michelle’s mother Mary Lou insisted. Bill Jones, Michelle’s father and Teri’s brother-in-law, believes he has a logical answer. “Teri never could keep a secret,” he said. “Sooner or later she would have blurted it out.”
Charlie’s sister Angela was not so certain, eithe
r, even though Charlie had assured her that he would tell Teri.
However, according to some witnesses, when Angela welcomed Teri to the family, she called her new sister-in-law a special person, saying, “Charlie told you about himself, and you married him anyway? You must really love him.”
Teri hugged Angela and smiled in acknowledgement, Angela thought, and said to herself, “Good. She knows and she accepts him.”
Charlie and Teri moved to their own home in Big Pine Key early in 1989, after renting for a while. In July 1989, just a few months later, a fisherman found the body of Sherry Perisho floating, facedown, under the Big Pine Key Bridge, approximately a thousand feet from Charlie and Teri’s home.
Mary Lou Jones recalled that their mother had always encouraged them to keep a diary. Teri kept a daily planner where she wrote mostly about mundane daily occurrences, such as “Good day!” or “A good dinner.” That began to change in 1993, when the “good day” became “weird,” or when “Charlie was away for the whole weekend.”
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement provided the planner, with locations for Charlie Brandt. Teri’s sister, Mary Lou, and Teri’s best friend on Big Pine Key, Melanie Fecher, supplied additional information:
“Teri and I always talked about not wanting children,” Melanie said. “That must be what she meant.”
However, Teri’s daily planner seems to speak from beyond the grave.
On Tuesday, October 5, 2004, Detective Sergeant Patricia Dally provided Special Agents D’Ambrosia and Edward Royal with a timeline, which Sergeant Dally had created from various entries in Teri’s diaries, dated from 1985 through 2003. The entries noted by Dally include dates on which Charlie traveled to other cities, states, and countries. Dally also incorporated in the timeline, the dates of three unsolved homicides in Monroe County.
The following is the timeline prepared by Sergeant Dally:
CHARLIE TERI LOCATION OR COMMENT
1985 April 17—blind date with Charlie
Invisible Killer Page 15
